Despite advances in telecommunications, there is still no practical way to deliver individualized and personalized messages to “the many”:                one-to-many,        many-to-one, and        many-to-many.        
There have been three great migrations in human history: the migration from hunting to growing (the Agricultural Age), the migration from growing to the city (the Industrial Age), and the migration from the factory floor to the office (the Information Age). Each migration was made on the backs of new technologies and new inventions. While the move into the Information Age rests on a base of ever-increasing amounts of processing capacity and available bandwidth, the widespread assimilation of more and more information first moved on layers of analog inventions and technologies—hearing and seeing from far away (telegraph, telephone, radio and television). Today, the Information Age is moving on wired and wireless digital technologies—being able to process what we see, hear, and know (computing). However, whether analog or digital, wired or wireless, deep down, it must be pointed out that the information revolution is not about technology working with data but about people working with knowledge; and people's minds can only make use of as much knowledge as their brains can absorb.
The history of inventions in telegraphy and telephony is a path and process of continually improving the manner and method of transmitting “dialog”—first human-to-human and then computer-to-computer. “Dialog” is the discourse or exchange of information between people and/or computers. First there were the mechanical devices like megaphones, followed later by electronic devices to amplify sound and transmit pictures. Then telegraph and telephone “lines” were strung to transmit “dispatches” (dots and dashes) and “calls” (varying amplitudes on an electric current) encoded and decoded with microphones and speakers and more recently with “modems” on either end of the line connection. With the introduction of less expensive microprocessors into telephone exchanges (carriers can cut their capital investment by 50% and the costs of running their network by 30%), the direction of this development path has changed, and the type of problems encountered on this new digital path are fundamentally different from those previously encountered.
Dialog to Digital Dialog
The obstacles to upgrade dialog to digital dialog, however, are moored not only in the vast depths of communications technology and the limitations of existing infrastructure, but also in our imperfect understanding of ourselves and our impulse to communicate. Because it's not natural, to engage in digital dialog must be made to seem natural.
Certainly it is the superior performance and economy of digital technologies that underlie the massive migration to digitally-processed information, digital tools, and digital devices. People have long valued processed information.
Digital computing enables us to do traditional things in a new way: word processors have replaced typewriters, spreadsheets have replaced ledger sheets, databases have replaced filing cabinets, and the computer screen has replaced the wooden desktop. However, it takes a deep understanding of the past and current state of telecommunications, the technologies involved, the forces at work, and the issues which must be addressed during this digital migration before it is possible to integrate onto a single platform the convenience and reach of telephony to the exponential increase of digital information. It is precisely because digital technologies and information can be interconnected in an almost limitless number of ways that the way forward depends on locking in to a common process, locking in to a universal method of matching people to content, and locking in to a single platform on which digital dialog is processed.
The stakes are high. Indications abound that digital dialog—the kind of communication that exists where phones and the Internet converge—will continue to reorganize the way people do ordinary things. As the two worlds converge, the “infosphere”—the world of connected information—expands. The part of the infosphere which is reachable by phone, personal digital device (PDA), or personal computer (PC) represents a potentially rich source of digital dialog. In this “telesphere” (the successor to telegraphy and telephony) is the opportunity to communicate differently (inform, sell, promote, update), shop differently, study differently, work differently, bank differently, or just browse differently. While telecommunications firms have enabled us to reach the Internet from anywhere—from home, from the office, at school, or on the move—for many things and for many reasons, we use less time, less energy, and less money if we could use the phone system and the Internet to handle digital dialog.
On the whole, digital dialog is synchronous—you say something then somebody else says something—but asynchronous dialog in the form of voice messaging, faxing, and text messaging has significantly increased traffic. Email is the biggest form of two-way asynchronous dialog used on a mass scale. The trouble is that, in using it, users are exposed to undifferentiated junk communication—the inbox is too full. The Web is asynchronous, and its use as a carrier of information is growing. The transfer of information is triggered by a visit, a click, or beginning an online session. Choices are saved so information can be personalized and delivered in the form of interesting views (information you can see) and messages (information you can read or hear).
With the three forms of communication and the many modes of dialog converging onto a common digitally-based packet-switched platform—and the capability of capturing more kinds of dialog—a need has emerged for a more efficient way to sort, deliver, manage, and store the traffic entering the system.
The opportunity to make improvements in telephony comes because of the migration to a digital platform. Like analog signals, digital signals are a representational notation. In other words, signals in the circuit are analogous to signals outside the circuit which act on a transferring membrane (in the case of digital signals, the digital circuit can be made to be analogous). Unlike analog signals, which are analogous to the forces impressed on it, a digital signal—like all digitized data—is a defined state, meaning that it can be assigned any meaning making it available for processing in ways only limited by the imagination, the capacities of the system, and the programming tools to process it.
A new method for handling digitally-based traffic is needed in the digital world because the content isn't transmitted as patterns in the frequency of the circuit like they are in the analog world. In the digital world, information in the circuit is packaged and described, making it possible to manipulate not only the content but the context before it is decoded and delivered to the receiver. The response from a digital dialog system can be significantly enriched and enhanced.
However, the migration to digital comes with as much complexity as opportunity. Digital dialog is a spectacularly complex feat—the equivalent of inserting a rudimentary brain between the eyes/ears and the mouth—where solutions must be found for the full range of digital complexity:                baseline complexity—our seeing/hearing, brain and speech circuits are biological mechanisms evolved to deal with images carried by light vibrations and sound carried by air vibrations. In order to transmit dialog, telecommunications inventions have, on the whole, focused on improving the reliability and fidelity in reproducing sounds and images at some remote location.        detail complexity—there are more details in the system than can be held in the “brain” at one time, so a structure, an order, and a process must be implemented to keep the details from overwhelming the system.        dynamic complexity—the fact that something affecting one part of the system is designed to (or unintentionally) affect other parts of the system even though they are separated in space and time creates dynamic complications which can overwhelm the system.        essential complexity—some components, factors, and forces that operate in and on the system are essential—they cannot be removed without the system failing—and so they cannot be ignored.        
It is because digital dialog is a multi-level, multi-platform, multi-media exchange of information that a full-service, turnkey digital dialog management system is the hairball of complexities that it is. At the moment, digital life is a bit uncivilized. The phone system lacks an underlying process to allow it to be used for calls and non-calls alike. Because people want access to increasing amounts of processed information, the phone system should and can respond—people shouldn't feel like nomads, stranded in a digital world.
To understand the place the disclosed systems and methods occupies in the evolution of telecommunications, a brief background is helpful.
The evolution of dialog to digital dialog is rather well known, but migrating from one communication platform to the next proceeded on inventions fashioned from emerging technologies. Michael Faraday's electromagnet split person-to-person speech and sight—which was until then processed by our one brain—into two paths of development (telegraphy and telephony) were developed to carry messages and sound, and television was later developed to carry images. It wasn't until the development of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee that sound and images would be joined again (but without a “brain” to connect them). So in the beginning, sound was directly perceived: sound—using air vibrations.
At a distance, sound can only be “heard” indirectly (tele+phone, or sound) using wires (or “lines”) and electricity. The “sound” was carried in and by:                code—dots and dashes in a connected circuit,        frequencies—modulating audio frequencies, or        logic—addresses in header registers.        
Working from Faraday's invention, Samuel F. B. Morse developed the electromagnetic telegraph and his system of dots and dashes in 1832. This system was improved upon by Alexander Graham Bell with his invention of the telephone, patented in 1876, and improved yet again in 2007 by the substance of the present disclosure.
Information has always been a part of our world but, until recently, it has been tied too tightly to the material world to process it externally. Over time, however, nature has developed a biological process of seeing and talking to process information. The ears, brain, and voice circuit has been created biologically to process objective notions (what's “out there”) into a “projection” (a reflection of our internal state outwardly expressed) or into feedback and response.
Before Morse, messages and information were conveyed visually, using “semaphore” systems of flags or lights. The government offered a prize of $30,000 for a workable proposal to link the Atlantic coast by “telegraph”, never anticipating electricity's role. Princeton's Joseph Henry had, in 1831, rang a bell at a distance by opening and closing an electric circuit, suggesting the idea of an electric telegraph. It took twelve years, but Morse persevered until the government was won over with his “astonishing invention”.
During his work on the telegraph, Morse needed political help to obtain support from Congress as much as he required technical and financial assistance. By sharing ownership of sixteen shares in a future telegraph system with a congressman (four shares), technician (two shares), and professor of science—Joseph Henry's protégé—(one share), Morse (nine shares) forged an alliance that would allow him eventually to succeed in claiming the $30,000 government prize.
What makes these technologies valuable is that they solve a problem that is important to other people by nudging then-existing resources into one bucket. In other words, in these worlds, monopoly works. Morse secured his monopoly by enlisting the support of politicians and government in a way impossible to do just 40 years later when Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent-monopoly for his “harmonic telegraph”. Once the government had strung lines everywhere for the telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell out-maneuvered Western Union, Thomas Edison, and Joshua Grey to put his “harmonic” or “talking” telegraphs at either end of a telegraph line. He survived 800 challenges to his 14 Mar. 1876 patent primarily because his well-to-do and well-connected father-in-law-cum-investor hated the Western Union monopoly and set out with Bell to establish their own.
The 29-year-old Bell already held two patents financed by his father-in-law: one for a method of multiple telegraphy, and another for two ways to produce the intermittent current necessary to carry telegraphic signals (by actually making and breaking contact or by alternately increasing and diminishing the intensity of the current without actually breaking the circuit). Knowing how to modulate the current in a closed circuit, it was a relatively small step to modulate the frequency instead; and when he succeeded, Bell abandoned his efforts to improve code-based telegraphy and pushed ahead to use electricity to carry voice dialog and, in the process, turned telegraphy into telephony.
Following the divorce of sound and image processing technologies in 1876, the convergence of voice and image onto a single platform wouldn't be made possible until 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web (WWW) and it was released by CERN, an event many consider to be the most important development to date in the Internet world. The Web was originally developed to provide a distributed hypermedia system to provide easy access to any form of information anywhere in the world, and it has revolutionized modern communications and even our way of life (according to many).
The impact the Internet has made on telephony—and will continue to make in interactive communications—is so great that a whole new type of communications is emerging. The world of telephony is becoming the telesphere, a single place where calls and non-calls can be resolved. The implications of migrating from natural to analog to digital devices and abstract representations or “digital” information is what enables the transmission of calls and non-calls. It is the exponential explosion of information that is driving up non-call traffic.
It is likely that trade and commerce are the primary forces that separate information from its material or objective side, creating a world solely of information. In computer processing, Moore's Law, a formula put forward by Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, has driven the computer industry for over 20 years: every 18 months, processing power doubles and costs drop in half. This technological/commercial maxim has led businesses to “go digital”, and there is no reversing this trend.
The use of web pages in business has its own drivers. In its simple form, business uses web pages to store and transport information because moving information over the Internet is, by the Internet's very design, the least expensive way to move information across the desktops in an office or across the world. The reason this is so is based on the well-known principles of Information Theory which explain the huge increase in information flows as being the natural consequence of globalization, or the tendency of increasing production to be located further and further away from ultimate customers. The so-called Knowledge Formula, developed by Boeing in the late 1940's to explain how it doubled its production of aircraft wings for the war until it reached 35,000 per year, is 2× volume leads to ⅓rd the costs, and vice versa. Because most of what constitutes business is merely information (set-up, capitalization of equipment and activities, information about products for sales and marketing uses, and payment itself) in different forms, and because globalization requires commerce to move information to customers at the lowest possible costs, businesses are simply forced into adopting the Internet as a medium for communication (websites, email, and e-commerce).
Web pages are expected to carry the bulk of information in the Information Age. For every $5 spent in production in 1880, only $1 was spent handling information (mostly for sales and marketing materials). In 1984, the ratio of spending in production to information was 1:1; in 1997, it was 1:2; and in 2005 it was 1:5.
With the development of digital computers, increases in bandwidth and processing speed have been used by software developers—using program instructions and data—to deliver useful applications to home and office, increasing convenience and efficiencies.
This growth in the infosphere is outpacing the growth of telephony. Non-calls are bypassing the phone system because there is no place in the telephone system to route, display, playback, manage, and store even a portion of available (connected) information pouring into the infosphere.
So, as we produce and consume ever more information, the communications platform supporting this transfer of content must be upgraded to meet demand. At first, language and the graphic arts were employed to process this freed information. Artwork led to advertising which (crossing the digital divide) led to brochureware and then to websites. Even in the digital age, the production and use of paper has skyrocketed. Gradually, however, technology is taking over the amplification, distribution, and processing of information. Notions once processed directly by biological components are now processed indirectly by technological components instead. This trend from paper to paperless is being carried out in the marketplace, workplaces, and classrooms around the world. In addition to capturing written information, the Internet is also the platform for interactive “chat” and social networks—what the dotcom industry calls Web 2.0.
It's not just the Internet that is benefiting from the surge in non-call traffic. The phone system is capturing some of that non-call dialog as well. Phone companies directly capture fax, paging, and texting and indirectly capture email and web traffic by providing “backbone” capacity for dotcom customers.
Today, even as the phone system and the Internet are converging, perhaps the biggest source of non-call traffic is just beginning to enter the marketplace: personalized information. Computer, software, and dotcom companies all have a stake in the rush for personalized information. Some are putting out phone-like devices; one is starting its own phone network. Phone companies are pushing back too. They're adding new phone services: voice messaging, Internet calling, caller-ID, call-blocking, conferencing, call forwarding, text-to-voice, picture-taking, photo-swapping, downloading (music), group alerts, global positioning (GPS), and map services.
While all of the above computer, Internet, and telephone services have greatly added to the ability to communicate, only the most electronically literate persons can utilize their power. For many people, the electronic options are overwhelming and add a complexity to life that is at the least stressful, and at sometimes destabilizing. Therefore, it would be highly desirable if an apparatus and method were available that allowed the average person to make sense of all of this technology and utilize its full power. If this method and apparatus also reduced stress levels and even enhanced the individual's security, it would be an important advance in the art.